Steel Kitten

Scene from my bus: little

 

Little House on a Small Planet

 

I deviated form my usual pattern of buying books secondhand or visiting the library to buy a new book this month because the chances of it coming up secondhand in the UK was too remote. In the US yes, but the UK? No. Naturally within minutes of it being delivered it turned up secondhand on Amazon. Sheesh.

By the way, am I the only person who likes buying new books because of how they smell? That heady whiff of ink and glue gets me every time. 

So...I've lately become a little obsessed with the idea of a smaller house. Perhaps it's the heady romantic notion that it might not need cleaning as often as this one that does it for me, or maybe the idea of a much smaller mortgage that we can pay off faster and retire sooner. I've been scouring the net for resources on small living and found this: Little House on a Small Planet by Shay Solomon.

I knew I was on to a winner when I read the first paragraph of the introduction:

Many of us know someone who has suffered the consequences of an inflated mortgage, an overwhelming construction project, or a house simply too large to keep clean. Will our dream home always be a celebration of excess, and a drain on our lives?

How much space does it take to be happy? Working in construction, I watched people's dream houses balloon into unmanageable giants. I saw the effect on homeowners, the psychological, social and financial toll, and I looked for new options that could lead them to a simpler, happier life."

The book is geared for the US market, so much of it refers to the phenomenon of those huge spacious homes that are common over there. I can certainly vouch for that, having lived in America for a year in a 'small' two-bed condo that took up the same space as a good-sized three-bed bungalow in England. Yet despite the cultural differences of this book, I can see many similarities. Much like American culture, English culture is starting to believe that bigger is better and that a bigger home is a sign of success. 

However, I'm one of those irritating flies in the ointment that sees a different story (I just wish I'd seen it sooner though!). Bigger house = bigger mortgage = higher bills to run and maintain (plus sometimes extra hired help to do the latter) = more money needing to be earnt = working longer to pay for it all and being tied to the stress of a daily treadmill with no escape. 

The book explores the lives and homes of many people who have already realised this concept is disconnected thinking and tells their story, with a view to helping you rethink what you have and what you actually need to make you happy. 

Tiny home; RowdyKittens photostream on Flickr

We bought our house - a three/four bed semi-detached - because I think we were surprised by how much we could get for our money compared to what we had 20 minutes away down the motorway. That is not a good basis for buying a property and I believe now that was a mistake. 

Including bathrooms we have nine rooms and a large-ish lobby. We routinely use four of them, day in day out. We occasionally visit - and by occasionally I mean once every week to two weeks - another four of them. The last we don't go in more than once a month. In fact, I'd go so far as to say three of the rooms are used as store rooms - my hobby room (not been in for five months although Martin pops in to check the hedgehogs while they are hibernating), Martin's hobby room (he pops in now and then to bring his hobby downstairs in front of the fire) and the back room, which has turned into a complete dumping ground. So that's around half the house. So I'd say half of our mortgage is a wasteful drain on our resources.

How much wealthier and happier could we be in a house about half the current size?  Pretty happy and pretty wealthy I reckon. And a smaller house footprint is more ecologically friendly, cheaper to maintain and easier to clean. The prospect of having that mortgage paid off so all you have to is find the bill money every month starts to look like a achievable reality. 

Small house in Lochcarron, highlands: www.geograph.org.uk

By the way, the book contains an interesting exercise which I am in the middle of doing at the moment and you might want to have a go at: 

• Create a list of activities that you do at home and things you need to do in your house. Be detailed. Stow the list away when you're done. 
• Keep a log of where you go in your house and what you do when there over a period of one to two weeks. Ideally log the time you spend in each place. In large rooms be specific about which part of the room you use.
• Look at the sapces you don't use. Imgaine what would happen if they magically disappeared. 
• Make another list of activities and needs without looking at the first list. Ideally, make a list every few weeks. 
• Pull out your first list and then compare it to later versions. Are you surprised?

If you do this exercise, I'd be interested to hear about any thoughts or conclusions you've drawn about where and how you live. In fact, let me know and I'll do a post about you!

Still on the subject of taking a stand

I'm still on the subject of what we do to our animals, mostly because I read this here the other day.

"Millions of hens will have their beaks mutilated; game birds will remain in cages; pigs, sheep and cows in abattoirs will lose crucial protection from abuse; badgers will be culled and lions, tigers and other wild animals will continue to perform in the big top. In a series of little-noticed moves, the Coalition has scrapped or stalled Labour initiatives to improve animal welfare some weeks before they were due to come into force.

The Agriculture minister James Paice, who part-owns a farm in Cambridgeshire, has been behind most of the moves – which have infuriated welfare groups. In the latest of a series of controversial decisions, Mr Paice this week delayed by five years a ban on beak mutilations of laying hens due to come into force in January."

De-beaking is agonising for a hen - to cut off an animal's 'top lip' with a hot wire is barbaric and there should be no place for it in the process of providing good animal health and welfare in Europe. It makes it very difficult for chicken to eat properly.

 

Credit: Free range farmers

James Paice - how do you sleep at night after you put profit before animal welfare?  Strangely I don't believe you are cruel. I believe you have something called 'detached detachment' for farm animals.

Having been a farmer and now part-own one in addition to your ministerial duties, you probably believe animals are 'commercial units' and have developed a way of dealing with them that doesn't involve compassion. You go through the ritual of paying for them to be fed and housed, but you could never put yourself in the place of an animal and feel its pain and fear because they are a commercial utility animal and you have no empathy for those.

I've been reading an interesting (well for me!) research paper recently about farmer's attitudes to animals which you can read here, and the most interesting thing I've found in there so far is this (I'm paraphrasing a bit):

Based on research among British livestock farmers there are four types of human-animal relationships:

• Concerned detachment
• Concerned attachment
• Attached attachment
• Detached detachment

Concerned detachment - farm animals are not seen as individuals; they are handled with care but are related to in a detached manner. The relationship is impersonal and indifferent (slaughterhouses and commercial facilities with large amounts of animals).

Concerned attachment - the farm animal is appreciated for more than their production utility and is seen as an individual. The relationship is more personal (common in breeding establishments). 

Attached attachment - farm animals are regarded as outdoor pets and receive preferential treatment (recreational hobby farmers).

Detached detachment - most common among farmers who only deal with their animals from a
distance and do not handle them directly, regard livestock purely as a commodity

This is where I beleive James Paice is in the scheme of things.

The most interesting thing I've read so far in the research paper that relates to chickens (perhaps it's so interesting to me only because I keep them!) and which I believe ties in with the delay in instituting a ban on chicken de-beaking is this:

‘Detached detachment’ and ‘concerned detachment’ seem to be the best way of describing poultry farmers’ relationships with their stock. This does not preclude taking good care of the animals and watching them closely, but one of the main features of this relationship is the de-individualization of animals. Chickens are perceived as part of a group (a flock) and of a production system. The number of animals is undoubtedly an important factor, as is the lack of contact with individual animals. This later issue is related to the housing system. Farmers with housing systems that minimized contact with the animals and had a high stock density tended to lose sight of the animals as individuals. Farmers who kept chickens in outdoor and free range systems expressed more attachment to their chickens and recognised them more as ‘real’ animals. Some broiler farmers expressed that they had difficulty in even confronting the living conditions of nearly full grown broilers. This suggests that avoidance of attachment might also be related to feelings of guilt.

We really, really need to stop seeing animals as 'production units' if we are to claim we are civilised.

 

Credit: The Woodland Trust

By the way, if you like the idea of your forests staying put as well, best have a look at this petition. The coalition government has decided a good way to raise some cash is to sell off our ancient woodlands to the highest bidder. If you quite like the idea of walking through woods and helping wildlife life happy lives, please sign the petition. 

Otherwise our ancient woodlands will be razed to the ground by enthusiastic businesspeople looking to recoup on their 'investment'.

Less work than you think

 
"Ok lady, put the camera down and hand over the blackberries."

Something Jenny at My life in Flip Flops said about my last post got me thinking. She said a garden redesign sounds like a lot of work. It's funny but compared to how much I would have to do if the garden stayed as it is, the redeisgn is actually less work because it is based on permaculture techniques!

In permaculture, everything in the garden has multiple purposes to conserve energy - including human energy tending to it - and you don't fight nature, you work with it and use it constructively. For example, I've spent five years battling with the dandelions, weeds and brambles at the bottom of the garden. After a couple of months of the chickens being on there and scratching around, I no longer have a problem. And the chickens provide me with eggs, manure for the garden, and kill off pests at the same time. I didn't consciously plan that - I just wanted the chickens contained so they stopped wrecking the garden and it seemed the most appropriate place. The penny only dropped a week ago about what had been achieved.

For a really lovely introduction to permaculture with some great illustrations, have a look at this by Graham Burnett:

http://www.spiralseed.co.uk/permapdf/handout.pdf

As I've decided to go for a no-dig garden where possible, all the beds I plan on overhauling will have a layer of composted manured chicken straw and bedding, followed layers of wet cardboard, newspaper and wood chip, then compsost and soil plus a top layer of mulch, either hay or straw.I'm going to buy in 100 extra soil worms for each bed and they are going to do the digging work for me, burrowing through all the layers and dragging it all down to begin changing the substructure of the bed. Compared to what I would normally do (double digging, manuring etc) this will be a doddle! The hardest part will be finding the cardboard, although a trip to Wyevales this morning netted me enough for half of one bed.  

Yesterday I dug out the existing flowers and weeds in the bed nearest the patio.

 
The soil is poor with no organic substructure to it so all the plants were weak and had some kind of disease. Even the weeds were not doing well and all it took was a quick yank and everything came up. All I left behind was the buddleja which looks wonderful simply by virtue of its enormous tap root. As a treat, I let the chickens loose on there for the day to clear the site of pests and rake it over for me.

A couple of years ago we were given an old pond and I put that in yesterday to provide extra water down this end of the garden for the wildlife. The hedgehogs use the path past the bed to get round the house to the street and apart from the saucerfuls that we put out, they have no other real water source. The pond has stepped levels at one end so if one of them accidently falls in it can get out quite easily. I'll be adding some stone round the edges with crevices so newts and frogs can hide.

My intention is that this bed will be a herb spiral and salad crops, including cherry tomatoes, as they are shallow rooting. I don't yet know how the buddleja will affect the bed's water supply so until I do I don't want to plant anything deep rooting. I suspect I will need to think up a way of keeping this bed permanently irrigated using water from the roof of the conservatory about 10 feet to the left of it.

My hope is that I get three of the beds nearest the house done by Christmas ready for spring planting, and that the ground closest the rose arbour and pergola can be prepared in a similar way for growing climbing beans.

The view from the end of the path with the rose arch.

The pergola with a clematis dying of wilt. That will come out ready for climbing beans.

 
Martin putting the roof on the workshop.

I won't tell you what I'm thinking of doing to the outside of the workshop, but it involves growing food vertically and Martin should be very afraid.

Urban permaculture

I've spent some time over the last few days thinking about our garden.

I'm finding our third of an acre very stressful at the moment. Everything just seems wrong. In the wrong place, in the wrong soil. Things I would need every day are too far away and things I don't look at twice are too close. I spent hours cutting the grass, spiking, fertilising etc yet it is in a bad way, badly dehydrated with builder's rubble and metal appearing up through it. It's never used anyway so why am I expending the energy?

I've been flirting with the idea of completing redesigning the garden according to some of the principles of permaculture. It would make much more sense to have the veg beds near the house rather than down the end of the garden. If you want to pick something every day and keep an eye on pests so you don't have to spray, it's easier to keep an eye on it the closer it is. The things you rarely use or tend to should go further away until you have a wildlife area at the bottom of the garden.

So I've been doing a bit of searching and come up with some interesting videos on edible gardening and permaculture. The video above has three 15 minute documentaries - the first on forest gardening, the second on edible landscaping and the third urban permaculture. The third one caught my eye. They live in a 3-bed maisonette in the UK and have a 75ft garden which they grow a lot of their annual fruit and veg. They don't dig, only mulch, and spend about 2 hours a week out there. Quite inspiring and lots of food for thought.

Getting back to basics - rubbish, recycling and food coverings

I've actually had this post written for over a week and it's been waiting for photographs, but an interesting story in the papers this morning made me realise it's about time to get it on here. 

Do you remember how the government wanted to introduce a local bin tax that would make everyone pay for the rubbish they throw away? They couldn't get any councils to step forward to take part in the trials though so they shelved the plans. Guess what? They're back, but this time they're going to be brought in by the Joint Waste Authorities, which neatly sidesteps the local councils. As of next summer they plan to start charging householders for the waste they produce. 

I can't decide whether to be pleased or angry. On the one hand it will force everyone to consider what they throw away and make changes. On the other, it's going to cause tremendous problems as people try to dispose of as much rubbish as they can in other ways. There'll be neighbours hot-footing it to each others bins in the middle of the night, an increase in fly-tipping, more skip hiring, and more back garden bonfires and waste being burnt in open household fires. 

I think Martin and I will be ok as I've made a huge effort over the last year to recycle or re-use everything I can. Plastic milk containers and tins are the only things that we recycle in quantity because with hundreds of plant pots, I have no use for the milk containers, and I have tried to make other things from the cans like planters, but they rust too easily and look unattractive.

But there is another thing I can't use or recycle and it's really irritating me. I've noticed over the past year that the amount of rubbish I'm sending to landfill is decreasing, but the proportion of plastic in what I am throwing away has increased tremendously. I've decided to attack this as it makes me quite depressed to look in a rubbish bag and see nothing but a sea of plastic that will sit in a landfill for hundreds of years.

So I've been making some changes over the past week to tweak our existing routine waste and recycling routine.

Clingfilm city
The first thing that has changed is my clingfilm usage. I'm tired of all those containers in the fridge covered in cling film. Leftovers from meals all sat in bowls covered with  - clingfilm. When I make rhubarb jam, I put the rhubarb and sugar in a bowl in the fridge overnight and cover it with  - clingfilm. When I left my whey out on the bench overnight I covered the tops of the jugs with - clingfilm. I seem to have descended into the clean convenience of clingfilm hell without even noticing.

So I've rooted out all the containers I have with lids (all naturally at the back of the most inaccessible cupboard) and stacked them in easy reach - if I want to put leftovers or other food in the fridge, there's no reason why it can't go into a container. Quite a lot can be simply covered with a plate or bowl. For everything else I decided to do some cloth food covers from a re-purposed vintage linen bolster pillowcase. This was part of the stitching I was doing over the Bank Holiday weekend. 

I don't have any weights yet for the edges of the little covers (yes that is a cross-stitched duck!), but I'm hunting for beads and big buttons that will do the job. Eventually I aim to have a mix of various-sized flat covers and round covers with elastic or ties round the edges to fit over bowls.

Food packaging
The second thing in my rubbish is plastic food packaging. As I'm still at the point where I'm buying things in from supermarkets, everything that comes into the house seems to come in wrapped in plastic. 

Growing our own fruit and veg automatically cuts down on those irritating plastic bags from the fresh produce section (even the paper bags for mushrooms have a plastic window in them), but in the meantime I'm going to take a few trips down to our local farmer's market and see if I can get loose produce straight into one of my own bags. Paper bags are an alternative, but long-term they just add to the amount of resources that have to be recycled, so I may make some out of cloth.

Then there's the meat from the supermarket, butcher's shop and mobile butcher's van, which all seems to come individually wrapped in several layers of plastic. I have more flexibility with the van to get the meat wrapped in what I like, so I'll be using it a lot more and maybe ask if all of the meat could go into one bag and sort it out into my own containers when I get home. 

The big one to combat will be the food packaging of dried goods. I'm looking to buy a lot more foods in bulk in the future. I already buy 4kg plus bags of pasta and rice and am hunting for a supplier of bulk flour so I don't have to keep buying small 1kg bags. I'm also on the lookout for somewhere that allows you to refill your own dried goods in whatever container you like. A few years ago I remember living near a shop that did this, and I would  go in and look at all the dried grains and pulses lined up in storage bins. It was a terrible temptation to dig my hands into the bins and let all the goods run through my fingers (small pleasures!). I haven't seen one of these shops for years though. 

Finally, I'm aiming to increase the amount of cooking I do to combat the need to buy ready-made food. For example, Martin buys Cornish pasties or slices for his lunches during the week, which come in a plastic case surrounded by a plastic sleeve. I'd like to make these for him if I can perfect my pastry. He also adores noodles, so I end up buying those little packets of noodles with foil sachets. There must be an alternative to this. I've stopped buying pizzas from the supermarket, which come wrapped in plastic and often a cardboard box, and now make my own. And much tastier they are too....no more overloaded soggy middles!

So I challenge you to look in your rubbish over the next couple of days and see how much is made up of plastic. Some is biodegradeable, most is not. Can you change anything to cut down the stuff that isn't? 

Frucool

It's the new buzz word - apparently it's now really cool to be frugal hence the new word. Thank God. Finally I'm in fashion. I am Frucool. Excuse me if I don't buy the T-shirt, but paint my own. 

Talking of buying, is it my imagination or is this country's officials getting a teensy bit scared that we're not spending any money at the moment?

I keep seeing column inches devoted to this minister or that civil servant imploring me to go on holiday or start buying colour TVs. It's not that I don't have the money. I do. I just don't want to spend it right now thanks. There's no law that says you have to spent all of your income. By not spending money on unnecessary consumer goods, making do with what we have and recycling what we can, I believe we have tremendous power and freedom. Hence the frustrated squeakings from the government and retailers. I think this poster sums it up:

 

Photo by Georgina Coombes

I also thought this was quite funny....

Besides not spending my money just to annoy government ministers, I also don't spend money because I equate every pound I spend with having to give up a certain number of minutes of my life working.

Once you start to equate consumer goods with the amount of time you'd have to work for it, things suddenly stop looking too attractive. Well it did to me. I used to earn £9 an hour after tax when I worked in an office so every skirt I bought for £40 cost me 4.5 hours of my life. Spending £65 a week on food when I was single because I didn't budget, meal plan or buy smart meant almost one day of my working week was spent grafting to feed me - and a shocking amount of that food ended up in the bin because it was an inpluse buy and I didn't get to eat it before it went off.  

Over the last seven years, I've learnt to value time much more than money. If I get the work done that pays my bills I can then spend time with Martin. Or the chickens. Or in the kitchen garden. Or knitting. All things to me much more worthwhile than killing myself to get more money to pay for a bit of consumer tat. I don't believe in building a business with staff and offices and stationary and stress and long hours just for the possible reward of being able to sell it at some point in the future. My life is happening NOW. I'm not putting it off for some mythical date in the future when I can get loads of wonga, by which time my husband has left me, my family are gone and I'm probably too ill too enjoy it.

No thanks. I think I'm going to have to stay as I am, no matter how much those ministers sqeak with fear.

Do you want to join me?

Wind up Eco Media Player

I was very excited to read a couple of days ago that British inventor Trevor Bayliss has come up a wind up Eco Media Player. It has a 4gb memory and you can store 2,000 songs on it, as well as listen to FM radio, watch movies, store photographs, read data files and ebooks, and record your own voice.

We were given his previous invention, a wind up solar radio, for a wedding present and it's one of the most useful objects in our house. Because it doesn't need mains electric or batteries it ends up going everywhere with us. When I'm digging over a veg bed, it's wedged securely in a tree branch, and it sits on the top deck of the staging when I'm working in the greenhouse. It's been dragged from pillar to post by Martin while doing DIY, and has been covered in plaster and brick dust, and occasionally paint and wall filler too. It's even come camping with us. It's a real outward bound workhorse.

According to the bumpf on the Eco Media Player, full minutes wind gives 45 minutes of music and you can also charge it up from the USB port of your computer. A full charge will give you 48 hours of music playback and six hours of movie playback. 

The price is not too bad at £110 either. Go over to the Eco Media Player website and see it for yourself. I'm putting this on my Christmas list.